Escape Studios: Week 2

Hello again!

So this weekend I'm pretty tired, I think I'm still adjusting to the early mornings and daily commute (and being squished between lots of miserable commuters every morning) I'm moving to London asap as it is much less expensive and almost halves my journey time :)

In the meantime, though, I'm still very much enjoying the course, though the stress has begun to creep in, as at the beginning of this week we chose items for our upcoming project. I have gone with a gameboy color, as I had an old (amazingly still functional) one at home! It may not look like the world's most complicated object, but take a look at the sides/back and you realise there's a lot more detail than you think!

We basically have to create it from scratch, model it to scale, and then texture/light/render it in a scene so it looks as photorealistic as possible. Not asking much, then, right? I'm not going to lie, I'm a bit nervous about this, but after seeing some other projects from past students (who like me started out as beginners), it 

was encouraging to see how much progress they made in such a short space of time!

This is where I am currently. I've been playing around with different modelling methods, including NURBS curves and polygonal modelling. Think i prefer polys but we'll see which works better! We were warned we'd probably have re-model about 5-6 times at the beginning to decide on the best method, but I'm running with this for now!

In other news this week, we finished off our brief training in NURBs modelling (as it is used much less frequently) and started to model in polygons. Immediately I found it a lot easier to get my head around!

As our classes are separated into 50% tutorial, 50% individual work time, we also learnt more about modelling in polygons and toggling between smoothing options to get an attractive result. This week involved a Mustang plane:

And a tractor tyre:

We learnt a lot of different techniques this week, including linear modelling, and non-linear modelling - which means rather than working into one surface, and adding detail afterwards, you work up from a flat plane (e.g, upper screenshot) and then once you have the details where you want them, you add deformers/rotations in order to get the desired result! I can't wait to be at a stage where I can just glance at an object and immediately know which methods to use - at the moment there seems so many different options its difficult to start anything!

I'm pretty far off dragons haha, but I think I need to master real objects first before I can think about anything remotely fantastical :)

Thank you for reading, and I'll be updating again next weekend!

Annie

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